Questions aplenty after Indian team announcement

The team selected for the first 2 Tests against the visiting Australians, beginning on 22nd Feb at Chennai, has it's share of bewildering surprises, but to a large extent seems justified. Amongst the 3 changes made, dropping the woefully out of form Gautam Gambhir is the one which is being hailed as a brave and logically correct move. However, a few questions need to be asked of the selection panel, with respect to the squads picked for the Irani Cup, which is supposed to reward the top performers of the Ranji Trophy season.

The Irani Cup offers an opportunity to play against and amidst the best in the nation and aims to bridge the gulf between the domestic and international cricket to an extent. Time and again, lack of an X factor has been mentioned as the reason for not including Ranji and Duleep Trophy giants into the national side. So, one begs to ask the question as to how the selectors come to that conclusion, without testing them in the Irani Cup, especially when they get the chance. There are many examples to illustrate this argument. Jiwanjot Singh, the Punjab opener, scored close to 1000 runs (17 innings) in his Ranji Trophy debut this year. Compared to that, Shikhar Dhawan and Murali Vijay, who were chosen as the openers for the Irani Cup tie, scored just 461 (11 innings) and 138 runs (8 innings) respectively. Suresh Raina, who was discarded from the Indian Test team after a poor show against New Zealand, made it to the Rest Of India squad on the back of just 304 runs in 10 innings for Uttar Pradesh. He did have an incredible run of form against England in the ODIs, but if selections for the 5 day format are based on LOI performances, it gives a raw deal to those who have slogged their way in the Ranji games.

On the bowling front, Parwinder Awana, rewarded for a few strong performances with a spot in the squad for the 4th Test against England, has now been dropped for the Australia series. One fails to understand how the selectors squeezed in Abhimanyu Mithun, who has 5 wickets fewer than Awana in the Ranji season, into the Rest Of India playing XI. Awana has every right to feel slighted as he has been dropped from the Australia Tests without being given a realistic chance to prove his worth. Sreesanth, coming back from a career threatening injury and having played only 4 first class games, managed to find a spot in the Irani Cup game.

The bemusement doesn't end there. Considering the timing of the Irani tie which is being played 2 weeks before the 1st Test against Australia, a good showing in the 5 day game should have held some weight. If the rationale for including Raina in the ROI squad was his ODI performances, then his scores of 134 and 71 in the game should have been convincing enough for him to make the 15 man squad. It worked for Vijay and Dhawan, who managed to catch the eye of the selectors with convincing knocks against the moving ball. But in the case of Raina, they delivered a googly and chose to ignore his scores. It makes the whole exercise of fielding him a bit redundant.

Selection or rejection despite merit, is not the only problem with Indian cricketing decisions. Currently, as far as the spin department is concerned, India faces an acute scarcity. Pragyan Ojha and R Ashwin, the top 2 spinners, were mostly in-effective against an England side which struggled against the turning ball in UAE. Considering that Ravindra Jadeja was picked for the 4th Test purely on his batting exploits, the only other spinners to be given a look-in were Piyush Chawla and now-on-the-wane Harbhajan Singh. The latter did nothing to inspire confidence, while the former just about managed to surpass the almost-negligible expectations in the Nagpur Test. Now, Chawla has been dropped again to make way for Harbhajan, who was largely lacklustre in the Irani Cup tie. Does that mean no other spinner is good enough? If the competition isn't healthy enough, how will the comfortably perched spinners be forced to raise their game?